Leaning back on my hands, I stared into the dark where the water lapped at the sand. “What does?”

“Life.”

I pushed my alarm aside. Pearl wasn’t suicidal, just muddled over weightier matters than most people contemplated or worried on, because they couldn’t really be solved. That, I got. It was the place we’d always met. “Those are some big questions. Pretty sure lots smarter people than me have argued over those things for a long damned time.” I smiled down at her. “No one seems to have reached an agreement, near as I can tell.”

“Yeah, I know.” She turned on her side to face me, folding her arm under her head. “But what do you think?”

I chuckled and glanced at the empty bottle just behind her on the sand. She was a little two-beer lightweight who got all metaphysically curious when loaded instead of drunk-dialing an ex like everyone else. No surprise there. “What difference does it make what I think? My opinion doesn’t matter in anyone’s grand scheme of things.”

“It matters to me,” she said, dark eyes probing mine as if I had the answer to her philosophical uncertainties and she meant to dig it loose.

I pondered her question, unsure it had an answer and even less sure I was capable of finding it. “Okay. Well. I think life is like a test on a subject we came in not knowing much about. We do the best we can, and we find out after it’s over how we did. Or maybe we don’t ever find out. But when you say my opinion matters, doesn’t that eliminate the option of life being pointless?”

“My life, because your opinion matters to me, or your life, because yours is the opinion that matters?”

“Both.” I paused and she waited for me to gather my thoughts. “What if all humanity is like a mechanical creature—made up of millions of parts, all working together, but sometimes not? Parts break or wear out or malfunction and have to be replaced by other, newer parts. And that keeps the whole thing going indefinitely, as long as new parts exist to replace the old ones.”

She flopped onto her back and sighed. “But we’re still just interchangeable parts then. We’ll eventually wear out and get replaced and not matter.”

I grinned and shook my head. “You’re making a sorry case for pointless with that pity party. None of us live forever—we all learn that early on. But maybe you’re one of the important parts. Maybe my dad served his purpose when he fathered me, and I served my purpose when I pulled you out of that ocean you keep wanting to dive back into.”

She was quiet for a heartbeat before turning her head to look at me. “That’s not true, Boyce.”

When she didn’t say anything more, I lit a cigarette and dug my toes into the sand at the edge of the blanket. The breeze pulled the smoke out over the water where it dissipated into the darkness.

“You’re trying to figure out where you fit,” I said. “That’s one of the cool things about you. The fact that you care about things like what kind of difference you can make and how to make it. That’s why I can’t believe people like you, people like Brent, would be born into the world for no reason.”

“I didn’t—I didn’t mean he—”

“I know you didn’t. Maybe I can’t be impartial where you and Brent are concerned. I’ve always been a self-centered son of a bitch, y’know. Everything eventually comes back to how it affects me.” I took a drag and smiled down at her. “Looks like that includes your existence, sweetheart.”

Pearl

When Thomas brought that enormous lightning whelk shell in with the morning paper, I knew Boyce had left it for me. I hadn’t seen him or heard him leave it, and I wasn’t psychic. I just recognized his shirt—a green baseball tee with dark green three-quarter sleeves. He’d filled it out better than any boy on the actual baseball team would have, and the green in his eyes, usually indistinct from across the lab table, glowed when he wore it.

I had no idea what it meant that he left that shell on my front porch. At fourteen, the motives of sixteen-year-old boys baffled me in general, but Boyce—kissing me cross-eyed one night and acting like it hadn’t happened a few days later—left me bewildered.

Crusted with barnacles and marsh weeds, packed full of sand, the shell would have been an odd gift for anyone but me. I loved it, apart from Boyce and his intentions. But I loved it all the more because he gave it to me. I spent the day digging the sand out of the deep aperture and scrubbing the outer whorls and crevices with an old toothbrush. Once it was clean, I polished it with mineral oil and set it on my desk.

“I wonder who put that shell on our front porch and why?” Mama asked at dinner.

I shrugged and stared at my plate.

I didn’t find out why he left that shell at my doorstep until over two years later—the first and only time Boyce was ever in my bedroom, the day after we graduated.

The fact that I was lying on top of my comforter buck naked—next to an equally naked Boyce Wynn—seeped into my consciousness slowly. Though I’d thought long and hard about who (Boyce) and how (protected) I’d lose my virginity, I couldn’t say I’d seriously contemplated the where or when. In my fantasies, the setting was always somewhat ambiguous but always dark. Because of course it would happen somewhere private, romantic, and dark. Not at ten a.m. on my own bed with at least a dozen people in the house.

After discarding the condom, he collapsed next to me. I stared at the embossed patterns on my ceiling as the sounds of our breathing slowed simultaneously and our shared muteness became a whole different sort of loud. My bikini and sundress were on the floor, on the opposite side of the bed. On the opposite side of the boy lying next to me. The bedding was in disarray beneath us, but not enough to dive underneath without making an awkward spectacle of myself.

I suppressed a panicked giggle. I was lying on my bed with a boy in the bright light of day, naked as a jaybird. I’d rocketed past both awkward and spectacle a ways back.

That was when he rose up on one elbow and pointed at my desk. “Still got that whelk, huh?”

Pretty much the last subject I expected to discuss at this juncture was the shell that had been sitting on my desk for two years.

“Um. Yeah.” I wondered if I could grab the edge of the comforter and roll myself into it without looking like a lunatic. Or a burrito.

“I knew it was meant to be yours the minute I found it. So whatever happened to my T-shirt?”